Questions for the Medical System

It's been six weeks since my knee became virtually useless and my enemy.

It still keeps me awake nights and I have to learn to suppress sudden screams of pain better, cause it startles clerks, when trying to get groceries and what have you.

Six weeks later and I still have nothing but guesswork diagnoses. I want to know if I'll ever be able to walk more than a couple hundred feet again or live without pain again.

Instead I've conflicting and confusing instructions.   Three visits, one of them the ER, the night of the injury.     Is it the entire system that's this way?  Does everyone go through this?  Or do I just have the wrong doctor?  I don't know the answers.  Is this normal?  To sustain an injury and then not even know what happened six weeks later, or how to make it stop hurting?

All I know is I'm disgusted and wish I'd never thought the medical system could help in the first place.  Maybe then I could have found a witch doctor, a faith healer, consulted youtube DIY fix your own knee videos, an earnest educated medical school drop out seeing "patients" in their garage for a few bucks or trade in services, something more reliable and helpful than the medical system in this valley, to give me answers or even (dare I hope)--relief.

If my knee is useless, I'd rather my leg be amputated above my knee and get a prosthetic so I can walk.  What good is a leg you can't walk on without wanting to scream?

It's just in the way.

I don't need a doctor to be my friend.  I need an efficient doctor who quickly diagnoses the problem and plots a path to healing. Fuck the inefficient system too, that kicks the can down the road for months, as patients suffer and injuries get worse and spawn other injuries.

What if the medical system were in charge of fixing a broken car.   Your car would be broken or barely running for months if not years, while money poured from your pockets or insurance company and your frustrations were silenced by the guilt of not properly respecting your mechanic.

This whole baloney with primary care doing nothing really but writing prescriptions and referring people to a very few specialists like orthopedics, who are few and far between, is a grave inefficiency in the system.  And expensive.

Knee injuries are common.  PC's need to know how to quickly diagnose and treat them.  Maybe have a PA or even a nurse, that then does physical rehab in a back room, or closet.  If that is what is needed.  If further diagnostics are needed first, a patient is same day referred right to get those.  Instead, we wait months.  And costs mount and the injury gets worse.

That's my rant for the day.  I did get a physical rehab consult, but not til mid August which will mark the two month anniversary of my injury.

In other news, a Waterloo mom cat and two of her kittens were fixed yesterday.  I'll take them back to the woman who cares for them today at some point.